BERLIN – Local author Thomas Quinn has recently published his third book, “The Machiavelli Letter”, a novel that pits a college professor who is an expert on the teachings of Niccolò Machiavelli against terrorists who would explode a nuclear device in America.

Quinn and his wife Catherine have vacationed in the Ocean City area since the 80s and recently relocated to Berlin from El Paso, Texas to live near their daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. Quinn has always loved the sea. It’s one reason why his previous two books, works of historical fiction, are set in Venice, a great sea power in Renaissance times.

The first, published in 2005, was entitled “The Lion of St. Mark” and begins with the fall of Constantinople and tells the story of two Venetian noble families locked in a deadly struggle for supremacy against the background of Venice’s long and devastating war with the Ottoman Turks.

“My favorite novel is “The Count of Monte Cristo” so after my first visit to Venice in 1998, I looked for a similar novel set in Venice, but it didn’t exist – so I decided to write it myself.”

Two years later, “The Sword of Venice” was released.

While the books did well enough, Quinn recognized that what really thrills a large segment of readers is, well – thrillers. So he shifted gears and went to work on a modern-day thriller.

“I dreamed the plot one night and woke up at 4 a.m., my mind filled with ideas. Ten hours later, I had completed a synopsis that, amazingly, has been little changed since. It’s a sort of Magnificent Seven inspired by Machiavelli’s principles meets nuclear terrorists,” he said.

If you read The Prince in school, then you will be amazed to see how Quinn’s characters apply Machiavelli’s principles to deal with the challenges they encounter in today’s world.

When he and his wife made the decision to leave El Paso and move to the Eastern Shore, Quinn decided the time had come to publish “The Machiavelli Letter”.

For more information on any of Quinn’s novels, go to Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com.